4. Two books which deal with the history of this period do not disentangle the similarities and differences. David Widgery’s The Left in Britain 1956-1968 (Penguin, 1976) has an implicit movement within it towards the emergence of International Socialism as the hidden denouement of the left after the book ends. Nigel Young’s An Infantile Disorder? The Crisis and Decline of the New Left (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977) contrasts the American and British New Left.
He assumes that all aspects of Marxist politics before 1956 in Britain belonged to the dark ages, and sees the fact that the British labour movement had survived during the fifties as a disadvantage which prevented the emergence of a genuinely ‘new’ left. He appears to have little sense of political ideas developing through the clash and interconnection of different traditions in which people can learn to respect one another’s cultural political heritage.

6. See, for example, Conference of International Socialists on Revolutionary Unity Documents, February 1978. Two of these were published: Richard Kuper, ‘Organisation and Participation’, Sociaiist Review, july/August 1978; Julian Harber, ‘Trotskyism and the IS Tradition’, Revolutionary Socialism, no. 2; Richard Gombin’s The Origins of Leftism (Pelican, 1975) is useful to compare the British left groups with France.

7. Shaw, ‘The Making of a Party’, p. 107, op. cit.

8. See Rose Shapiro and Tricia Deardon,’No Leaders, No Dogmas: Getting Personal about Politics’, The Leveller, no. 14, April 1978.

9. See, for example, Fernando Claudin’s account of the Communist International, The Communist Movement: From Comintem to Cominform, Peregrine, 1975.

11. F or a discussion of Trotskyism as an identifiable political tradition see Geoff Hodgson, Trotsky and Fatalistic Marxism, Spokesman Books, 1975. Jim O’Brien’s summary of the histories of American Leninist groups makes for an interesting comparison with Britain. Jim O’Brien, ‘American Leninism in the 1970s’, New England Free Press, 1979. (This article originally appeared in the November 1977/February 1978 issue of Radical America. .

19. I think now that Women: Resistance and Revolution, in asserting the existing involvement of women in revolutionary movements tends to dismiss the various currents within feminism from the late nineteenth century as well as the involvement of women in non-revolutionary organizations like the Independent Labour Party or the Women’s eo-operative Guild So while it challenges women’s position in socialism, it does not raise the relationship of socialist organizations and the feminist movement. Also, because it was written just as the women’s liberation movement was emerging in Britain (1969-71), it inclines towards seeing the particular understandings of the new contemporary movement as a synthesis with answers that evaded movements in the past. Ten years after, the strengths of past movements are more apparent am! it is possible to have a perspective on the modern movement which enables us to see our weaknesses as well as our gains.

A much clearer example though of the uncritical acceptance of a simple polarity between socialism and feminism appears in an otherwise useful introduction: Barbara Winslow, A Short History of Women’s Liberation Revolutionary Feminism, (USA, Hera Press, no date). Although recently reissued the bulk of this pamphlet dates from the early period of the women’s movement too.

For an example which rushes enthusiastically into the same trap see Anna Paczuska’s ‘The Cult of. Kollontai’, Socialist Review, December 1978/January 1979. This eccentric effort purports to be attacking a ‘cult’ which is the creation of the author’s own imagination, while herself adopting an uncritical stance to Kollontai’s sectarian approach to feminist organizations.

27. See, for examples of this, Hal Draper and Anne G. Lipow (eds.), ‘Marxist Women versus Bourgeois Feminism’, The Socialist Register 1976, Merlin Press,179-226. Draper and Lipow seem to be unaware that the political contribution of the women’s movement and the work of feminist historians can enable us to unravel various strands of feminism ‘and quite different relationships between women and radical movements which do not involve setting the leading women in German social democracy upon a pinnacle of correct socialist consciousness. The documents they translate are nonetheless useful for tracing how Marxist positions on ‘The Woman Question’ emerged.

38. On the need for the organizations on the left to learn from the women’s movement see: Margaret Coulson, ‘Socialism, Politics and Personal Life’, in ibid.; Frankie Rickford, ‘The Development of the Women’s Movement’, Marxism Today, July 1978; Celia Deacon, ‘Feminism and the IS tradition’, Conference of International Socialists on Revolutionary Unity Documents, February 1978.

The East London Socialist Feminist Group Conference Paper 1978 discussed the need for us to also look at general problems of socialism, not only women’s issues.

Margaret Coulson makes the same point in criticizing John Ross’s article on ‘Capitalism, Politics and Personal Life’. He confines women’s liberation to a social sphere, trade unions to the economic and politics to the revolutionary party. She says, ‘his formula blocks us off from understanding the processes involved in the development of politics’. (Margaret Coulson, ‘Socialism, Politics and Personal Life’, Socialist Woman, October 1978.

41. Red Collective, ‘Not So Much a Charter, More a Way of Organising’, mimeograph, 1974. (The Red Collective were a small group of men and women concerned to relate socialism and sexual politics.) This statement is quoted in Barbara Taylor, ‘Classified: Who Are We? Class and the Women’s Movement’, Red Rag, no. 11, p. 24.

43. V.L Lenin, What is to be Done? quoted in Carmen Claudin-Urondo, Lenin and the Cultural Revolution, The Harvester Press, 1977, p. 69.

44. Ibid., p. 71.

See also Lindsay German, ‘Women and Class’, in Socialist Review, no. 5, September 1978, and the reply by some Hackney Socialist Feminists, ‘Feminism Without Illusions’, in Socialist Review, no. 7, November 1978.

54. All the left organizations have sought to encapsulate the implications of the women’s movement within the terms of equal rights 01′ concrete demands and campaigns, ‘issue politics’. They were distrustful of the emphasis upon challenging and transforming relationships and upon the COnsequences of this approach to politics. They preferred the language of ‘rights’ and ‘discrimination’ to that of ‘liberation’. Liberation has tended to be suspect and has been sorted away under ‘culture’ which has dubious middle-class connections and might even be a mere creation of an over-heated feminene imagination! I think these anxieties have affected not only the leaderships of left groups but socialist women within and without them. Personally it has been the continuing practice of the movement which has helped to shift some of the nervousness for me.

Amanda Sebestyen makes a similar point in Cat Call, Issue 3, July 1976.

Anti-Feminism as a Political Force’, Radical America, Vol. 11, no. 6; Vol. 12, no. 1, November 1977/February 1978. (This article is also available in pamphlet form published by the New England Free Press, 60 Union Square, Somerville, Mass. 02143.)

62. On NAC see Ruth Petrie and Anna Livingstone, ‘Out of the Back Streets’, Red Rag, 00. 11; Roberta Henderson, ‘Feminism is not for Burning’, ‘Speculations’, in Cat Call, Issue 2, April 1976; NAC and its Lessons for the Socialist Feminist Movement, document, Socialist Feminist Conference.

63. Unofficial Reform Committee, The Miners’ Next Step, p. 12.

After this was finished I read two articles which are arguing along similar lines from rather different starting points. If you are interested in following some of the ideas through either in terms of strategy of the women’s movement and socialism or in terms of working-class community organising, see: Nancy Hartstock, ‘Feminist Theory and the Development of Revolutionary Strategy’, in ed. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, op. cit., and Kathy McAfee, ‘City Life: Lessons of the First Five Years’, Radical America, Vol. 13, no. 1, January-February 1979.